My favorite trivia is that busybox has built-in cgi-bin support (and `rclone serve webdav` seems remiss to not mention as well). `https://elixir.bootlin.com/busybox/1.37.0/source/networking/...`

Everything the post mentions is 100% true and well-reasoned, especially with the inclusion of pledge/chroot/etc. for dropping privileges.

There's two diametrically opposed deployment mechanisms:

1) stack towers of glop on top of each other until you're running a simple `echo "hello world"` on top of a docker container inside a vm in a proxmox server as part of a k8s cluster under a hypervisor running on remote compute...

2) just run `bash -c 'echo "hello world"'` and front it with CGI (stateless, single binary, yada yada yada...)

Take a peek at https://github.com/Domain/bash.cgi ... not that i'm suggesting that 'bash over busybox using cgi-bin' is the "proper architecture", it's more trying to illustrate that the amount of code that holds you back from being nearly truly "frameworkless" is tiny and easy to reason about.

For some of the internal tooling I'm doing for work, I've been tending towards:

    some-cmd [--json|--markdown] ...yet-more-args...

When you use the process and shell environment itself as a repl, you start trending towards `[--cgi-bin]` would "just" be another output type, and the ability (nay: foresight!) to ensure that your commands are independent, reproducible, and only depend on their input arguments leads you directly towards being runnable in both "hostile" (ie: firecracker vm / lambda-style) or very "comfortable" environments (ie: shell, debuggers, unit/integration tests).

▲ rpdillon 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Mirrors my experience, and it's funny you mention busybox: I just discovered busybox's ability to serve via `busybox httpd -p 9000 -h . -f -v` with a `cgi-bin` folder dropped in the current directory.

I already write Python services using Bottle that function both as a standalone server and as a CGI script, and I've been updating them to work with busybox's more constrained CGI environment (basically being able to handle the lack of .htaccess rewrite rules).

I definitely see a chance for simple deployment tools to make a resurgence as we create more one-off/disposable/personal software, and the low system requirements for something like busybox + lua stack are extremely minimal, which fits well with the current DDR4-is-good-enough zeitgeist. I'm running them on an old Raspberry Pi 2B and it's plenty performant for the ~10 people that access it regularly.

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MomsAVoxell 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Instead of busybox+Lua, I just use TurboLua:

https://turbo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Event driven, fast, all the networking basics in place including http, mustache templates and encryption, light and small executable, very nice for embedded applications, signals and fd handling built-in, very easy to use…

Have used it very successfully for million-dollar projects, including some scientific applications running on limited-resource systems (512 megs of RAM) ..

Was very, very easy to add C functions to interface with the web front-end, libffi is great for this purpose, but its also very easy to extend as a standard, well-written Lua/C application ..

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rpdillon 5 hours ago | parent [-]

This is exactly the sort of thing I'm really interested in. I'm particularly excited about various takes on Lua+batteries, have looked into designing my own (C wrapper with bindings to networking, JSON, templating, and DB libraries), but found Redbean to be almost ideal so never got past overall design to dig into code.

Turbo looks fantastic, though! It's precisely the niche I was looking to have filled, so I'll build a prototype or two in it to see what I think. Very much appreciate the pointer!

	▲	MomsAVoxell 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You’re welcome - we share interests, I too am interested in the Lua+batteries approach to life - I’ve used Lua very successfully in many commercial projects, so I’m quite convinced of its power in spite of the warts and thorns that many newbies in the ways of Lua tend to whine about. TurboLua is particularly great because it really integrates about all of the I/O mechanisms you could want in a network-centric application, plus it has a pretty nice runtime loop which is easy to hook into and coordinate properly with signal handlers and fd sets and things. Can’t beat it as a very quick way to do embedded stuff too - very easy to do gpio, signal handling, etc. Good luck, if you have time to share your thoughts after an initial first-pass, I’d be happy to hear your perspective ..